Monday, June 16, 2014

Eleni Sikelianos, You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek)

I want to say: this is
a tale of redemption. But it isn’t.

But it is.

When I wrote the book
about my junkie father, the stories moved out of me.

Now, where will the cat
girl’s daughter’s stories go?

American poet Eleni Sikelianos’ new creative non-fiction memoir is You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek) (Minneapolis MN: Coffee House
Press, 2014). The author of seven trade poetry collections, including a “hybrid
memoir,” The Book of Jon (San
Francisco CA: City Lights Books, 2004) that she composed on her late father,
this new book focuses on the complicated life of her maternal grandmother,
Melena, who married five times, had three children, was an infamous burlesque
dancer, and rewrote her life constantly to suit her purposes and situation. Existing
in a lost space, Sikelianos’ memoir works to reclaim an incomplete story, attempting
to excavate, explore and articulate what had been lost, forgotten and even deliberately
hidden. Writing of her grandmother as “the toughest, hardest-assed woman to
ever eat wood and bit nails,” Sikelianos is the archaeologist seeking to
connect the fragments of an impossible map, and yet she is fortunate enough to
have an enormous amount of information on her late grandmother’s life, from multiple
stories passed down from various family members, to an array of posters, fliers
and clippings of Helena’s life in burlesque, a number of which are reproduced
in the book. The book even includes an appendix at the end, allowing two of
Melena’s three daughters to “respond to the book about their mother,” allowing
Sikelianos’ version of Melena to not automatically overpower and even replace
any other possible versions.

While my grandmother’s
paternal great-grandfather was making millions in ragpicking, dime museums
filled with taxidermy, gambling devices, human freaks, and lady dancers kicking
up their heels in the back were paving the road to my grandmother and her
burlesque.

What speaks to me is
the curl of her foot. Our spiritual guides are beautiful women in sequined
halter tops who teach us how to have a good time. Under the Salomé veil is the
divinity of sex. Belly, breasts, waist, thighs, hands, neck, the angle of her
head is a question, the question mark an invitation. There is something hiding
in the shadow between shoulder and clavicle: dark, the father, the closet. Her
eyes are angled toward the corridor from which someone will enter. Something is
tangled up between this life and the next. She is urging him to get up and come
to her (but not unless it’s after the show and he’s willing to pay). You don’t
get to touch. Harry, you get to think of
touching the soft skin of the inner thigh: it’s a contract between her and
the forty men in the smoke-filled room. The hip slides in lazy circles, flesh
moving gently over the bone: all of the Orient between her hips, a small sea of
inviting flesh. What is she thinking of? The man who wants to touch her? The
wad of bills she has to give to the club owner, the mobsters, the cops? Have
her kids eaten dinner? Something more brooding, some black cloud over the
brain? The men at the bar drink until they love everybody or fight. This is the
story of what slides between the Leopard Girl and the men watching her. This is
a miniature history of the way women are watched.

Someone said, it is not
pornography until there is no more expression of particulars. When the details
of the woman dancing under the lights—the elegance of her leopard’s hand, her
curling fingers, the arch of her foot—are lost. (The leopard loses its
hunger—its true animal nature—the moment I crop it to one eye and an ear.) Dora
Vivacqua, la Luz del Fuego, the naked snake dancer, was assassinated by a
religious fanatic at her nudist colony (a little island on which only the
unclothed were allowed) in 1967. Perhaps it was the end of burlesque.

A
book of outcasts, Sikelianos’ poetic memoir is a remarkable exploration of
personal history, the fluid nature of identity, and the impossibility of
knowing everything about anyone, especially someone as complicated, changing
and deliberately slippery as Sikelianos’ grandmother, Melena. Writing such a
book on a straightforward character would be difficult enough, and Melena
certainly didn’t make such a thing easy, almost allowing for the fluid approach
Sikelianos takes, moving across and through her material, as much the patient
and detailed archivist as the granddaughter who simply knows some questions
might never be answered properly. Through You Animal Machine, Sikelianos’ archival quest for family comprehension is
reminiscent of some of the work of Susan Howe, such as the prose sections of That This (New Directions, 2010), or Alberta poet Monica Kidd’s memoir Any Other Woman
(NeWest Press, 2008). As powerful as The Book of Jon was, You Animal Machine
is a far stronger, and more complex work, one that plays with the form of the
lyric memoir, and manages to provide a deeply compelling portrait of a feisty,
fiery woman who lived fully and without apology, and rewrote herself constantly
for the shifts in her situation. Just who was this woman, once known as “Melena
the Leopard Girl”?

What does it mean to be
a wife?

A wife of what?

It just didn’t work out
for her.

Did she iron the little
man’s shirt, do the thug’s laundry after a heist, housework for the Jew? What
is the sexual body when put in the spotlight, when put in the shade of a house?

Did she kiss the little
man in the morning? Or grumble about the coffee, hoping he would take care of
her, bring her coffee in bed? But it didn’t turn out like that; or it did but
it didn’t please her in the way she had hoped

Five husbands. Five
households, five apartments, five bodies, five fingers, five lives five frying
pans with which to smack them over the head.

I’m trying to make
sense for her, build her a net that connects to everything, let her slide
around in an elegant way in daylight.